Best Of: How to Invest in the Coming Space Gold Rush with Tim Marshall

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This week we're bringing you our conversation with Tim Marshall, author of The Future of Geography. Just as miners in the 19th century ventured into the Lullis Frontiers of North America, the presence of ram materials on the moon and elsewhere might fuel a race to harness the opportunities of outer space. There could be a gold rust coming in space just as Tim Marshall. So if you haven't heard this one, listen in as a fascinating conversation on the extraterrestrial future of investing.

Maden. How often do you wake up in the morning? I see in the middle of the night and think to yourself, Oh, God, I was so gone as a public sector. There's some saying, and I know there is something that makes you wish the God that you tried out one of those civil service fast track schemes or even a slow track scheme or literally anything at this point, because you would have got what would you have got? The defined benefit pension, the gold plated pension.

Not just a defined benefit pension, a public sector defined benefit. This is, yes, this is the dream. This is the financial holy grail. It exists. Tell us about it. Tell us about the dream. What do you wake up at night thinking? Oh, indexing. Indexing with no cap.

uncapped indexing, the permanent backing of whatever government is in power, regardless of the flavor of government. No investment risk at all. I'd never have to bloody well think about whether UK stocks were cheap or not, or if they were ever going to not be cheap anymore. Actually, you're right. I'm going to wake up thinking about this tonight. Maybe I've started thinking about it. This is terrible.

joking when I said, I thought you did. I do. I do. I wake up at two o'clock, you know, most nights. And this isn't just not an age thing. I wake up at two o'clock most nights thinking, oh, God, I wish I had a DV. Just the idea that the money would come in every single month. And when there was inflation, it would come in a little bigger, a little bigger, a little bigger, a little bigger, a little bigger. You never had to sit and think, said to yourself, Oh, God, how do I make that diverse portfolio of global equities produce a little more yield to keep me up with inflation?

Never have to think that, right? Now, there is a possibility, is a possibility that come the next government, assuming it's a Labour government, although interestingly, I went to a talk yesterday, I'll tell you about another time, in which one of the speakers suggested that it wasn't the slam dunk, we all think it is. So that's interesting. But assuming that it is a slam dunk and that we are going to have a Labour government, they are talking about reinstating the lifetime allowance on pensions. So most people, and that will definitely 100% include you and me,

will have a cap on the amount of money they can have inside a pension, rapper, tax-free. But there is one group of people, one group of people for whom that will not, on current suggestions, one group of people for whom that will not be true. Who are these lucky people?

I can't imagine, but is it the public sector to find benefit, pension, receive ease? So a really big deal, this idea that you can divide people up and give one group of people very, very preferential treatment over another when it comes to retirement income. It's a big deal.

Yeah, no, it's massive and it would be completely out of order. My immediate instinct was, no, there's no way you can't just turn around and say we're going to re-impose the LTA for nine public sector workers. We're going to carve out the public sector. But the promise is, so there already is a group of public sector workers who aren't

Basically, because they were so well paid, even when the LTA was first introduced, so the judge's pension is not liable for the lifetime allowance. And I mean, because the way that swaps with the public sector is that obviously a final salary or defined benefit pension scheme is where you get a set amount of money each year based on your lifetime salary. And the way that the tax office very broadly speaking works out whom much that is worth for LTA purposes is multiplying it by 20.

Now that already means that actually the public sector workers get to earn more before the LTA because in practice 20 is a very low multiple compared to what the private sector version would be or the defined contribution version would be. But yeah, so the judges already have to carve out for this.

And the main reason that the LT has become such a big issue in recent years is because obviously it's going down, whereas can the doctors and surgeons salaries have gone up over time, you know, with inflation or less inflation, whatever. And so they came about this whole strum-ish where, you know, surgeons were kind of like working, but at the end they would get hit with an attacks, charges based on

This is because the sort of defined benefit pensions had become so generous that the ports were so high. And the point is that the government shouldn't be playing favourites like that. Right, John, given that, given that, what's your personal finance tip for the week? I tell you what mine is, it's a go back, go back 30 years and join the civil service, but maybe you have a better one.

in the absence of time travel. Basically, we talked about diversification by asset class, well, you need to diversify by financial vehicle as well. In the UK, it's pretty simple. There's the state pension, which you may or may not get the full benefit of that, depending on what age you are, and what happens between now and when you retire.

There's a private pension or a defined benefit pension. If you haven't have a private pension or a DB pension that's a corporate one, then again, you need to consider diversifying away from that. And the other thing is the ISA. So basically,

If you don't have enough money to fill up your annual pension allowance and your annualiser allowance, then what to do is make sure that you split it between the two of them rather than necessarily favor one over the other. Where I would favor the pension is, if you haven't maxed out your auto enrollment scheme, make sure you do that because it's free money from your employer.

And also, if you're on one of those marginal, horrible bets, like 50,000 before the child benefit high income tax kicks in, you want to do salary sacrifice there, and at 100,000 you want to do salary sacrifice. Otherwise, I'd basically go 50, 50. Because at least the AISA, you can get your money out straight away. So even if they do fiddle with it, which is probably won't, then you can get the money out and move it elsewhere.

It's less likely to fill up with ISIS, right? Because we will understand ISIS. Everyone understands an ISIS. It's simple. It's straightforward. We love them. You mess around with them. We notice.

And the money's not trapped. I mean, that is the thing about your pension. The money is trapped. It's a good thing, you know, we should be able to save it with corn from this, but you know, you just need to look. I mean, they're talking about the lifetime allowance. It didn't exist until 2006. And when it was introduced, it was 1.5 million. And at one point, there was 1.8 million. And then they reduced it rather than reason. So you just can't trust in stability of regulation.

Welcome to Marin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Marin Thumbs Up Web. This week, the conversation with author Tim Marshall. You might have heard me mention his name in previous podcasts, referencing one of his books. He's written eight fantastic titles, but I am a particular fan of prisoners of geography, and most recently, the future of geography. We focus most of our conversation on this one, the future of geography, because it looks at how power and politics and space will change our world. In fact, are already changing our world.

Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. I hugely appreciate it. Thank you. It's an honour. Good, good. Right. What I want to talk about is space. My producer says I'm mildly obsessed with space and people who talk about space and the truth is that I am. And you've written a phenomenal book on this that opens up the world of space to everybody. And if you haven't read it, listen, as I strongly, strongly suggest that you do do so this week because you really need to know about this.

So let's start, Tim, if you could just set the scene for us and tell me if I want to get on to the future of space and everything that is going to happen in space. But what's happening right now? What's the relationship between Earth and all that place? 60 miles above us? It's Space Race 2.0 because there is now a rationale to go back. I'll try and be brief, but Apollo 11 brought some rocks back and studied 12 and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 and then the Americans said enough rocks.

and they pulled the plug 50 years ago. And now we're going back, not just to the moon, but near the moon and geosynchronous orbit and low Earth orbit because it is now well worth it. We've gone back and are going back in greater numbers because financially low Earth orbit is hugely profitable for the satellite companies. You know, we've seen this sort of exponential growth. There's 8,000 satellites and now there's going to be more than well over 30,000 with just in five or six years.

geosynchronous orbit becomes ever more important. And we're going back to the moon because we've a found what best when they say we I mean humans we found water.

which means it's potential to put a base there. And we found Ligonite and Lithium and all sorts of those lovely metals that everybody needs for 21st century technology. So there is now a Gondite gold rush going on, but just as in Gondite, most people won't make any money out of it. When we go back,

I really want to come on this gold rush and I really want to come on for lithium and the helium and all these wonderful things. But first, I want to nail down the what's going on with satellites. And could you also please quickly explain? I think everyone will understand it instinctively, just in case geosynthesis orbit.

Low Earth orbit is where most of the satellites are. Round about 8,300 or so defunct ones. And the other ones that spin around the world very, very fast. So if you've got one, let's say you spy, for example. It'll only be over the bit of territory you want to look at for a couple of hours.

So you can put a constellation of these things up which connect to each other and you can try and have a greater amount of the earth that you can communicate with or look at. But geosynchronous orbit, much higher up. That orbit turns at the same speed that the earth turns. So if you put a satellite there, it's always over the same piece of territory. So whether it's a communication satellite that can always have direct line of sight, if you like, or

a spy satellite, or your nuclear early warning codes to make sure that they're so far away nobody can hit them because we can hit satellites in low Earth orbit from the Earth. That's a very, very valuable piece of real estate. And I call it that because it is geography.

not in a classic sense, but its geography in that it is an area, and it's a finite area. And when you put a satellite up there, it needs to have a very wide beam coming down to earth because it's so high up. And so consequently, you can only have so many there. So it's first come first served. That's geosynchronous orbit. So we've got around 8,000 satellites up there at the moment, or in that zone, another 20-something thousand coming.

And what are they all doing at the moment? They pretty much control every aspect of our lives, right? These satellites, we don't think about that. But if the satellites disappeared tomorrow, so would what we consider to be normal life, is that there? I think there's a strong case to be made for it. And a strong case to be made that the satellite should be considered and treated as part of our critical security infrastructure, you know, the way that gas and water and electric supplies are.

Because there is a backup plan. We do have deep water undersea cables, which could still send internet signals. And he could get your fax machines out of the office dump if the satellites went down. But it would be an almighty blow to the world economy or to the economy of a country whose system went down. Massive, massive financial loss. We just look at the GPS. How is the delivery drive we're going to get to the supermarket with the food, et cetera?

So I think they should be. So a lot of them are doing that. A lot of them are just doing straightforward cons where it's telephone communications or TV. So they just are part of the modern world. That's the reason it's such a growth industry and allegedly it'll be in a trillion dollar a year.

industry. Now, no to Bloomberg, that's kind of like loose change. But, you know, trillion dollars a year, that's quite a big industry and set to grow. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because that is private money. You know, we used to think of space as being a public place in that the old space race was between governments. This was in particular between the US government and the Soviet Union. And they were battling it out to try and prove that capitalism is better than communism or that was basically what it

world, wasn't it? Look, we can do this faster. We can do this quicker because we're a better society, right? So it was a very public space in the first round. And now it's a very private space. Most of these satellites, these are not military satellites. They're not government satellites. They're owned by private companies. They're launched by private companies from private space station. So it's a very different world up there. So when you talk about it being a geography,

It's less a public geography than private geography, and we don't know who belongs to. Ah, good word belongs to you. Because the infrastructure belongs to who does the infrastructure belong to? Us. Us. How?

Well, allegedly, it's the outer space commons, just like we have the global commons where the ocean waves are for all of us. But I'm glad you brought this thing up about commercial, because that's one of the biggest differences between the previous space race and now. How front and centre private enterprise is within it, both in partnership with governments and out there on their own.

And that is also another reason why this concept of the global commons is really frayed. I mean, it's enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

which basically says no one country didn't bother putting a company in because in 1967 nobody thought there would be companies out there. No one country can have sovereignty over any part of space, whether it's the moon, the planets, or just the areas in between them.

But that's really fraying now. And it's first come first served and it's, you know, we're out there back off. And there's even something the Artemis accords, which is the American led effort to get back to the moon and then establish a base where you can establish a security zone on the moon, which sounds to me like sovereignty. Just, you know, same letter at the beginning, just a different spelling.

And how big can your security zone be? Well, again, it's the the language is big enough to make you feel secure. Yeah, the language is loose enough for it. And also for how long can you establish the securities and also very, very loose language? Yeah, they are they are driving it. And they have allowed

Well, the governments have allowed, especially the Americans, private enterprise in many ways to lead the way. And it's private enterprise in its capacity for risk, Elon Musk's SpaceX being the greatest example, where they have risked all that money, for example, in the SpaceX rockets and being able to bring them back and land them.

You know, that is revolutionary technology which came out of SpaceX. It didn't come out of NASA. So this is a very new and different time. I mean, there's the new and different military aspect in which commerce is playing a role as well. So it really is very different to the 60s and 70s. And I would argue more complex and more dangerous and

What existing guidelines because they're not really laws because international laws are not always laws. We just call them that the guidelines and those guidelines are when they were written. We're okay, they're not okay anymore in the 21st century. Are you worried about the influence that very wealthy individuals and companies will have over the way our interaction with space develops.

Is that going to be a problem? Possibly up to a point. I'm not worried about what governments do as well. It's always good to keep a beady eye on both sets. It was very fashionable 20 years ago and has been ever since to write off the nation's state. I've always argued against this. If someone's burgling your house, you're not going to call Meta or TikTok for that matter.

or if the Russians invade. If individual X, SpaceX, wants to launch a rocket, they have to have a license. It's like a plane, you can't just take off and land wherever you want. You have to have a license and that comes from the state, so the state ultimately would retain a degree of control.

But yes, insofar as, you know, it is not good if one particular person owns too much media. It's not if there's a cartel that's got to get, you know, these things do need monitoring. But I do think that the governments will maintain most of the licensing control. And therefore, there's a degree of. Yeah, still control. By the way, mosque in the

Starlink internet terms and conditions that you sign now in 2024. It says in the event in the future that you are using our kit on Mars and you have any legal issues, you will not refer to any earthbound government or legal entity. You will only take your dispute up with the legal entity on Mars, which I read to be Elon Musk.

We have a situation where we've got a total creeper all up there with private and public, with satellites, with no one being entirely sure which part of this geography above us belongs to them or could belong to them. And everyone grappling for space, because there's got to be a limited amount of space in space and certainly in orbit, particularly now there's lots of defunct satellites and debris and all that kind of thing. So there's a limit to how much can be done in this close orbit area, right?

Yes, because obviously it is an enormous amount of space. I think the distance between low Earth orbit, which is 100 miles up, and then geosynchronous orbit, which is several hundred miles further higher up. But of course, that's in a 360-degree circle. And it's something, forgive me if I've got the figures wrong, but it's 3,000 times bigger than the surface of the Earth. There's a lot of space in space.

But the actual orbits themselves, you know, we've already got, as I said, 8,000. It's going to be 30,000. Some people put, say, 50, 60,000. I mean, the Chinese are, you know, going to launch them. Musk is going to launch 10,000 in the next few years.

And so although you obviously physically could fit even more than that in that big circle, the fact is the closer they are together, not only is the more danger of them crashing into each other. And then if one crashes into another one and another one and another one, you get something called the Kessler Syndrome where they all crash. So it adds to that danger, but it's also the military aspect to it where countries get pretty nervous

if other satellites are getting very close to theirs. You're going to try and crash into it. Satellites, some of them now can have grappling arms. You're going to grapple into my satellite. This is going back to the thing about law. There needs to be a new global agreement. One aspect of many, many that needs to be now written in the new age is how close can your satellite go to mine?

How many inspections can we agree that you can inspect my satellite and I can inspect your satellite to make sure you haven't got something nefarious on it? We just don't have these laws. And so that's why there's this finite amount of space. And then if you go higher up to geosynchronous, as I said, there's so much bandwidth needed in the sort of pyramid coming down, as you're broadcasting downwards, that you can only have so many, and therefore it's first come first served.

And so if you're not there, now or in the near future, you're never going to be there. OK, stupid question. When a satellite is defunct, do we remove them with these grappling arms? Or when we finish using a satellite, we just let us out there forever going round and round in circles and potentially bumping into other people? Not a stupid question at all. And in fact,

When I was doing the research and interviewing the experts, I thought the thing that they would be most concerned about was war in space. And it's not. It's debris in space. And that includes defunct satellites in which there are hundreds. Now, some of them are in a trajectory where each time they go around the Earth, they get slightly lower, slightly. I mean, it can take years. But eventually, if they're on that trajectory, they come into the atmosphere and they burn up, flame up, and disintegrate. So there's no more of that in space.

But others don't, and they're still revolving around there. Then there are literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of metal, some the size of a tennis ball, some the size of a grape, some tiny, but there's hundreds of thousands of them. And they're being removed at an extraordinarily slow rate. You can get hold of a satellite and throw it down into the atmosphere or throw it up into deep space, but

The fact is that the more and more stuff we're putting there, the more and more debris there's going to be in the more and more danger there is so. The Japanese, and I'd say the Europeans, are probably the two world leaders in pioneering new technologies to try to do something about this. I know it sounds sci-fi, but so much of the stuff that I came across. I thought was sci-fi, but it's happening now. As well as grappling arms, satellites can have actually massive fishing nets.

And they just throw these fishing nets out and catch hundreds and hundreds of pieces of debris. Bring them all down and either throw them into the atmosphere or they can even bring them back. But that's hard. But you know, all this stuff is happening, but it's not happening fast enough. OK.

Let me take you back to the second biggest worry then. If the first biggest is debris, the second biggest is war, space war. That's just us lasering each other's satellites. Shooting each other's satellites down from the earth, which you just heard was possible and fascinating. Or we're talking about something bigger. We're talking about colonizing the moon and then having a little rammy up there. Well, yeah, that's coming. And I'll try and come back to the Artemis of course, if I remember.

Right now, four countries have already done this. They have launched a ballistic missile from the surface of the Earth, and they've hit one of their own satellites in space and blown it up to test if they can do it in case they need to do it against somebody else's satellite. And that is Russia, China, USA and India. So that technology exists. And of course it would be an act of war to blow someone else's satellite up. So that's the first thing that has already happened, and I'm sure other people are working on it.

Secondly, Elon Musk's SpaceX as a side company, Starlink. And Starlink provides internet services via satellite. And two years ago, when parts of the Ukrainian internet went down,

because of the ground stations were bombed at the comp stations. Musk flew in thousands and thousands of dishes which could connect to Stalin and he got the parts of the internet back up and running.

Great. For civilian purposes. But of course, the Ukrainian military jumped on it and used it to target Russian soldiers, at which point the Kremlin ordered the Russian anti-satellite units to open fire is a loose term, but you can dazzle a satellite from the Earth. I don't think you can yet destroy it with a laser beam because we have clouds, atmosphere, rain, it diffuses the signal.

Hang on, what's that mean to dazzle a satellite? Sorry, well, you send a beam of light up basically at its lens and dazzle it so it can't see. Now, you don't destroy the lens because many satellites, lenses can blink, you know, they close if there's too much light coming in.

And or you send you spoof them spoofing is sending up packets of information to the satellite which confuses it. And so it doesn't know where to send its signal. And so Musk and Putin have been playing this cat and mouse game for the last couple of years, which is a brand new thing in warfare. Two sovereign countries at war with a third. Element in it, which is not a state but a private company.

which is inadvertently assisting one side's military, causing the other side's military to take what is essentially military action against it. I mean, this is a new time and it's something we're going to have to get used to. That's a second moment. And when that private company is associated with the third sovereign nation that is not technically involved in the war? Exactly, although is clearly involved but not directly. And so if it's dazzled, is that an attack

A day factor attack also on the United States attacking an American company. So, you know, I mean, obviously the Americans just coughed politely and pretended not to notice too much because, you know, they don't want to fight Russia. So third way, you may have seen a couple of weeks ago, the Brits of God and you laser weapon to take down drones, the Americans pioneered it a couple of years ago. Now, nobody's put one of those onto a satellite because if you did, you could shoot down a satellite

from a satellite very very easily because of course it would be so powerful up there because it wouldn't be diffused through the atmosphere. Now no one has because if you do you're going to spark an arms race but the temptation to is got to be great.

And then the last bit will be, well, this whole spoofing dazzling thing, if there is ever a major war between major countries, will immediately come into play. I mean, I put a couple of scenarios in the book about China basically fools the United States by dazzling its ones that are over the South China Sea. Looks like they're going to attack Taiwan. They actually don't. They do something else.

doesn't matter, but that's the sort of potential future. Sorry, last bit. We mentioned the Artemis Accords. We mentioned the safety zones. Well, what if country X, which is an ally of America or America, has already got to the moon, found the best place to start drilling for the limited amount of lithium there is there. And another country comes along and says, not your moon, we're going to

We're going to dig here as well, and they're going to say, hang on, we spent billions investing in this go away. People say that this is kind of a bit outlandish, but all you've got to do is look at history. All you've got to do is look at, let's say,

the British Empire and the companies that went out ahead of them, East India Company being the best example. And then following on from that, it becomes so useful that the British military then follows in and becomes involved. I just think it's very hard to see how that sort of tension will not be there in the future. As I said, I'm not convinced that the economics of mining the moon makes sense.

But as I've brought that up, I will briefly say why I think it might happen anyway. Okay, fascinating. And that's because I don't think a nation state or even a major energy company can really take the risk that this might be one of the most profitable things in the 21st century, but we're not going to take that risk. I think that will, even though the economics is not there, I think there will be investment in it. I love it that the risk is not going to the moon, but not going to the moon.

That's a fascinating statement about our new world. Yeah, the Chinese said the chief scientist in their moon mission, because they intend like the Americans to have a base by 2032, which will almost certainly slip, but that's the ambition. He said, if we don't go, and it turns out this is where the riches are, our children and grandchildren will never forgive us. I mean, that's the mindset, which I think will overcome the financial risk.

And I'll give you an example. There are private companies that have signed up with NASA. And NASA will pay them $1 for each expounds of rocks they bring back. $1. So what's in it for the companies? You get the license from NASA to do it, to launch, to land. You set the precedent that we're the ones operating here. And NASA set the legal precedent that you can

Uh, get something from the moon, bring it back and sell it. Cause that, that, that's an important point because if the outer space treaty says you can't have sovereignty, well, wouldn't that even apply to a rock? If you can't have sovereignty, how can you own that rock? And if you don't own it, how can you sell it? So that's why just for a dollar, people have prepared to, and that sort of thing is already happening. So the fact that you can sell it establishes the fact that it is possible legally to own it.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, not according to the outer space treaty, but, um, much as I love it and think it needs enforcing. Who cares about that? It's the contact gold rush. Okay. So let's move away from the possibility of war because I think we talk about that, uh, in so many different contexts. And you never know that there might not be a war, right? There's my role and I'm a good one. Let's talk about it. They usually isn't excellent point. They usually isn't and when, but sometimes there is, but let's assume

that we're going to work all this out amicably, and there's plenty of room for everyone's satellites, and everyone can colonise the moon without having too much phenology about it, and possibly even Mars, we can colonise all these things without fighting, because there is plenty of space.

Let's talk about all the good things that space might do for us, might improve our lives going forward. So we know at the moment it's amazing for communications, amazing for GPS, amazing for infrastructure creation, amazing for agriculture, right? I mean, absolutely fantastic. It's been huge productivity advances in the agricultural sector as a result of being able to use satellites to see what's going on with your land. So these are all brilliant things.

going forward. How is our extension of the geography of our world into space going to improve our lives? Let me count the ways. And I'm glad you counted some of them already because, yeah, you're right, things like agriculture are hugely important. And the satellites have massively helped, especially small scale farmers, you know, where to plant and when. But another one that's already happening, and I will come on to the ones of the future.

And again, this is for developing countries. If you've got two or three countries, let's say in Africa, that are trying to combine their economy or link their economies, the geography, the terrain of parts of Africa is very difficult. The satellites are able to tell you exactly where to put the rail or the road links at the cheapest cost, which is a boon. It's already helping us measure the temperature of the oceans, which helps us to understand climate change. I think that

Well proof of concept has proved last year Caltech California Technology Institute have their own little satellite, their own little solar panel and of course up there the solar rays are much much stronger because they're not diffused and they're 24-7 because there's no day and night. There's no night.

they managed to transfer the energy into a microwave signal and they sent it down to a dish and then they turned it back into a packet of energy and they lit a light bulb with it. Potentially revolutionary moment because if you could afford and if you could put up fields of these solar panels in space,

You can now direct the energy down to where you want 24 hours a day, unlike the solar panels at the moment, which of course only work daylight and sun daylight. So 24, seven, you know, it's coming down at night and it's coming down to wherever you want to put it. You can beam it to wherever you want to put it. So this is proof of concept has been proved.

economic modelling of it, then that's another thing. But it's the sort of thing that would help us get away from fossil fuels. So that's one thing. Another is...

Yeah, we've talked about that on this podcast before. I want to stick with this energy thing for a moment, because we've talked about this on this podcast before with somebody else who talks about this mirroring of solar energy down to Earth and how she, this is a Dr. Pippa Milgram, she seemed to feel that it was reasonably close and conceivable that within, she didn't put a timeframe on it, I should have pushed her on that, conceivable that in the not too distant future, all of our energy

problems could be solved simply with this sort of massive beam of energy from space. And I found that incredibly compelling as an idea, given that all we seem to do at the moment is bitch and argue and row about different forms of hopeless energy, when there might be one out there that can just sovereign, just like that. They might. I mean, perhaps when we have time, we can go on to helium three, but we're definitely going on to helium three. Can't go. Can't finish this with that helium three. I guess. Yeah. I mean, look, she

You know, it's far more about it than I do. I know that the scale you would need it at would involve a lot of mining down here first and building and then lifting the panels up. You know, we're talking about big, but I mean, the Japanese, you know, how so good they are origami. They are brilliant at folding fairly large solar panels up into very small folds, sticking them in the front of a rocket, taking it up there and then unfolding them. I mean, they are brilliant at it.

Galactical origami, I call it. So you can do that, but to do it at scale, the scale we're talking about, enormous, and the tech. And the batteries, you know, I mean, the batteries would be relevant to this, not as relevant as they are now. I mean, one of the problems we have now is not only that it's only daylight and someday light, it's that we can't store any excess energy because we don't have batteries big enough, we haven't invented them.

You wouldn't need them, but it would still help to store them. Well, you know that you'd need a massive upgrade. So I don't know the time frame either, but I do know the proof of concept. And it's that sort of forward thinking and revolutionary thinking I think will help us.

Okay, Helium 3, that's going to change our world if space mirroring doesn't. All right, a legend, no, there is lots on, we have Helium, and I hope I've got this wrong way around. We have Helium 4 down here, lovely stuff, from memory it goes into balloons, you know, children's balloons, where would we be without them? Very useful, and car tyres, some of them certainly used to be less soon, stuff like that. Oh, if you want to talk like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, Helium, very useful.

But helium-3, amongst noble gas, is in large quantities on the moon. Because the sun's rays there, because of lack of gravity and because of lack of atmosphere, it's very, very strong. It's why there's so much radiation. Now, the thing about helium-3 is that in the event you crack nuclear fusion, and I hope Mrs. AI does, then you can use helium-3

which is in tiny quantities here, but relatively large quantities on the moon. And you can fuel the nuclear fusion reactor with cheapish and clean, radiation-free fuel. That's the key, the radiation free bit. Again, the Chinese reckon there is enough of the stuff on the moon that if you crack fusion and if you can get it back, 10,000 years worth of energy.

So again, these are the big thoughts that we need to be thinking. Some of them might happen. Oh, you're sorry. You asked about the future and how useful it is. Yes, other stuff that is good. Yeah, you might have seen Don't Look Up the film with a big meteorite. Last year, Dart, they threw a dart. That was the name of the mission. It was basically they launched a fridge freezer at a comet at an asteroid. There's too little.

Asteroids revolving around each other about three million miles away. We fired a fridge freezer at it. That's shorthand for a piece of metal about the same size. And it hit the smaller of the two and it deflected it off its course, proof of concept. And we also, you know, we need that as a backup plan in case we do look up and think, Oh, dear. So, you know, without all this, without all this,

leaving to along one side nonstick frying pans without the space race much of the useful tech and including 21st century tech would not be with us now and I think on balance despite the negative sides of it I think it's a positive.

Which countries are going to be the most powerful in space in 25 years? I mean, we can assume the US, China, Russia. I mean, you've named the big three and they will remain the big three, but I believe that

the top two will be China and the USA, because they will be doing both the military and the commercial aspects. I think the structural problems that Russia has means, and it's already doing this, its budget will be focused on the military side of it, so they will slightly drop away on the commercial scientific side.

Okay, but then among the little guys, you've got, you know, here in the UK, we were talking earlier, I'm terribly excited about the Shetland Space Station, right, which hopefully will have launches relatively soon. And I think we've got another launch station coming in, Cornwall, haven't we? And then there are various other countries that are setting up launching stations. Is it Nigeria? Is that my imagination? They certainly launch satellites and the African Union has some plans. Let me come back to this. I mean, you said little and yes, relative to the state.

It's little, but I put it in different tiers. So there's the top three, even though it's sort of two plus one. And you come down to the leading second tier countries of which the UK is one and France and Italy and Israel, UAE, Japan, who I put them in a block. I mean, obviously some are bigger than others.

And in that block is India. But India is the one in the second tier that looks like it will accelerate. I cannot see it catching USA China even in the timeframe that you gave. But it can go ahead of that second tier.

By the way, when we're talking China and America, it's their companies as well. I mean, there is going to be a Chinese SpaceX. I just don't know which of the many startups in China it will be. So then you move down to the third tier. And then you're talking about countries like Nigeria, which make their own mini satellites, keep satellites and send them up into little constellations.

And there's a raft of them. So there's 80 countries now have a presence in space. Only a handful of them are space fairing. Only a handful are players. And then the third tier, you have a presence. And then you get the fourth tier, which is the majority of countries in the world who have no presence there at all. And given that it is finite, the amount of usable space, they may never get there. So I put it into the

As you need to be there now, if you're going to be there a long time.

ideally. Okay, let's talk about the companies. Now, when we talk about space, we always end up talking about SpaceX. But if you if you were able to look going to 20, 25 years out, have you any sense of what the big names commercially might be out there? It might be interesting to see the big mining companies might suddenly turn up with with a presence in space, right? The big energy companies might suddenly and we could suddenly turn around and find that Shell has got to colonize the moon, right? Well, Toyota.

Um, for, you know, it's only a computer, but they've already built on the computer massive moon rovers, you know, the sort of size of an articulated truck.

and they're in partnership with JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency. Now, this truck doesn't exist. It may never exist, but the fact is that Toyota are looking at it existing. Some of the energy companies, also some of the Japanese startups, have already been up to trying to get some rocks.

The Indians landed at the Luna South Pole, which is where the water is and most of the metals, which is thought are. So if we go 25 years, what we're looking at, 2045, let's say. No, that's not true. 2050, nearly. Yes, that's a good date, 2050.

because that's the date that Musk said he'd have a million people on the moon, which is absolute fantasy. But is it possible? I mean, it's not going to happen, but is it conceivable ever that a million people could live on the moon?

Yes, yes, yes. 2050, not a hoe. I just do the maths, you know, just divide a million by 25 years. Where are these 40,000 people every year or whatever it is? So 2050, I'm confident we will have, we will be mining on the moon by that point.

I'm confident we'll have a moon base. As I said, 2032 is the ambition. A man and a woman will walk on the moon again in 2026 in two years' time. The Americans, Artemis' mission, I mean, again, these things tend to slip by six months or a year, but they're saying 2026, walking on the moon. Which would be great for Sting's songwriting royalties. One for the older listeners there.

It's only 2050, probably massive solar panels, almost certainly mining the moon, definitely some form of moon base, whether it's scientific, military, commercial, or a combination of the three. We will not only have got to Mars, well, we've already got to Mars, there's several rovers roving around it already, but we'll have come back because they haven't really brought things back from Mars yet. That will have happened, I reckon, within 2020. But a person has gone to Mars. And robotics are going

Robotics are going so quickly.

that by then will probably be able to send spacecraft with robots on, which can begin the very beginnings of a base there. They can build it. They can 3D print it. They don't need oxygen, water, et cetera, et cetera. So I think all those things are feasible. But the idea that we're going to have a million people, or even thousands, even hundreds on Mars in 25 years, I find them. But no person on Mars in 2015

No person on Mars in 2050, just a robot. We may have landed. It's a big ask. We may have landed. I mean, there's enough fantastic Netflix and other paying channels available series about things like that, which are great fun. We may have landed. But it's ambitious. It's ambitious. The thing about Artemis and the Chinese version of it,

is that they've gone back to the idea because there was a huge debate over the past decade. Do you try and go straight to Mars from here? Or do you go to the moon first, make your mistakes, learn your lessons, and launch from there as the lily pad to hop? And at the moment the moon has won out because it takes more fuel

get from the surface of the earth to the moon far, far more fuel than it does to get from the surface of the moon to Mars, even though Mars is, you know, millions of miles away much further because, you know, because of escape velocity of getting out of the atmosphere. Let me ask you a final question. This is also about belief.

If I were to say to you that you were going to the moon, I'm going for 10 years. It's going to be great. I'm sending enough oxygen going to the moon for 10 years and then you can come back. But before you go, I'm going to let you invest in something. I'm going to give a choice of two things that you can have. One is Bitcoin and one is gold. You have to choose one of these things. Your entire net worth is going into this thing and you'll be back from the moon in 10 years.

What do you think you'd take? I mean, probably plenty of gold on the moon, right? I'm not going for that long because I've got a season ticket at Legionited, which I need to renew. But if I'm forced to, and you can freeze that. I'm freezing it. Frozen. Gold. I'm not convinced by Bitcoin. I know it's, I mean, you talk about belief.

money is just, as you know, it's belief. You know, I believe that this piece of paper here is worth that much. I believe this piece of metal is worth it. It's just a belief system. And I just believe that gold has far more even in the next 10 years. Now, if one of the asteroids crashes on earth that's got more gold in it than has ever been mined, I've made a bad bet. Failing that gold.

Yeah, that asteroid may also take out the internet across the UK, across the world, which point Bitcoin is worthless too. In which case gold is also far more. Yeah. Gold. Gold. Look, I know it's not doing very well at the moment though, is it? But it'll be back. Jim, thank you. Thank you so much. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you. That was fun.

John. What did you think about that conversation? I thought it was fascinating. That really was just so interesting. And I also understand a lot more stuff that I have to say I previously had a somewhat foggy grip on.

What about like the different kinds of all that kind of thing and how far up everything is. And, you know, I don't know if he said on the podcast, but maybe I would do the book that we think of space has been so far away. But if you were to just drive upwards, it's only an hour's drive away, less if you break the speed limit. Well, that's a good lane. Really very, very close. I might have added a bit about the speed limit myself, but you got the general idea.

I thought it was great. Again, I can see more clearly why there's a bit of a gold rush now, because anytime anyone talks about lithium mine and I'm kind of like, can you send a rocket when you can just go to Australia and dig around a bit more thoroughly?

But I can see the arguments, no. And also the fascinating thing about it's we kind of need a cold war to get us to explore these places, which is a bit depressing, but at least there's an upside. Yeah, we need to have a bit of a rammy as we know. We need to have a bit of a rammy to get the technology going so we can see where we're at, right?

It's a bit of a, it's a bit of a coin test, a kind of virility coin test between nations and also, look, I can get to the moon faster than you. Yeah, but that was the interesting thing, that the last time around it was a virility thing. You know, communism is better than capitalism. You know, we're a better society. We can do better things because, you know, when we're coherent in the society, whatever it is, there's some Soviet Union versus, versus American business. What's interesting now,

is the fact that it's not really like that. There's a bit of that in the background who gets to colonize the moon first, who gets to put a person on Mars first, etc. But actually, the majority of this work is being done by private companies. And so we have this vast amount of private money up there. It's a completely different dynamic. And suddenly, you know, Elon Musk is making rules which won't hold, but nonetheless, making funny rules about what happens on Mars.

Yeah. Totally different dynamic. And I've been really interested in that thinking, well, space really isn't a public place, it's a private place and that's very different. But then Tim made this excellent point that even if there are no laws in space, there is still a hell of a lot of laws on earth and everyone who wants to go to space has to leave from earth. So you've got to get someone's permission to send your rockets up, to send your satellites up, to send your spaceships up.

It's like all things. And he said at the end, which was so interesting because I keep saying this to people and you keep saying this to people, never write off the nation's state. When it comes right down to it, this is where sovereignty lies. It lies within the nation's state. Every state makes its own world. They have the power. If you think they don't try breaking their laws.

I was going to say that. I thought it was really interesting. It brought that up because it's true. I mean, I'm a big sci-fi fan and one. I didn't even know that about you. We know it doesn't fit well. I didn't know that. You kept it secret for decades. I'm just coming out of the closet to the start of what I was saying. I was to a shainted mittity. No, but one of the key features is sci-fi over the last 40 years. This kind of Tim sort of says is that

It's always a bit big corporations can eliminate and the dystopias are all run by someone probably a bit like Elon Musk or something like that, who's maybe the best intentions, but they've destroyed the world to a rambition and governments are either enthralled to them or they don't exist. And that is clearly kind of nonsense. Push comes to shove.

Um, as it very much has in the last 10 years. Um, you know, because I guess it sort of also came about from the nineties and the end of the first Cold War, because everyone kind of went, Oh, that's it. You know, we all agree. And basically one big global country now. And obviously that's proved to be complete nonsense. And, uh, you know, we've seen the ton of the nation state, we have engines over the last kind of five to 10 years. So I thought, yeah, that was a really good point. But then you get to the point and we talked about this a little bit with him.

We talked about which countries are going to be most powerful in space in 30, 40 years. And then we talked a little bit about, well, who's going to, which companies are going to be super powerful in space in? And he mentioned, which I thought was just so interesting, he mentioned Toyota. They haven't made them yet, but they've designed moon rivers.

And so there are going to be so many companies out there who are already working on stuff that we never think about. And they may be household names already, we just don't think of them as space orientated companies. And I'm just fascinated to wait and find out who they are and how that's going to work.

Yeah and I mean it's also it's more because you know there's the problem with stuff like this and investing and this sort of thing is it's the usual story we are okay it's very exciting area but which companies are actually going to survive and which companies are going to do best.

How are you going to invest in that? How are you going to invest in that? There are ways to invest in what's going on in space at the moment. SpaceX, of course, is a well-known company in this space. It's not listed, but nonetheless, there are a lot of funds that you can buy in the UK that will hold SpaceX. Maybe it may be at Bayley Geford, I think. Yeah, thanks Scottish mortgage. It's got 4% of its portfolio in SpaceX.

Okay, so you've got about five investment trusts, barely given investment trusts alone, that hold SpaceX and Edinburgh Worldwide is another. They've got nearly 6% of their portfolio in SpaceX. It's one of their top holdings. So if you want exposure, a little bit of exposure to what's going on in space in a particular to this rather amazing company, that's where you go. It's not going to move the dial on your investments. It's only smallest percent, but nonetheless, you'll know you've got a tiny bit of skin in the space game.

Yeah. And the other way to do it, yeah. And the other way to do it is, um, Seraphim Space, which is a trust that holds only space companies. Now, before you start telling me about your successful program, and I'm going to tell you about my success, um, in that when they launched a few years back, I looked at it and I was as interested in space then as, as I am now in this trust. And I thought, well, this is absolutely fascinating, but, but, but, but in the middle of a growth bubble, this stuff is insanely able priced. It's a bit silly.

And I wanted to tell you, John, this is one of my rare successes to share prices of 44% since that launch. So I'm fairly pleased with that. But you wrote about Serifem just a few months ago, right?

Well, yeah, I wrote about it as a kind of part of a grab bag, a highly discounted investment trust at the end of November. And it was trading at this kind of something, like 70%. And there's still pretty good reasons for that interest rates are going out privately listed, et cetera, et cetera. So, so private assets. But yeah, it's up about 90% since then.

I mean, the one thing I would say is, is trading at about 60 p.m. and then now there's around about 96 pence and it's come along. It's still a big discount, but it probably deserves a big discount. Even if you don't, if you're not going to invest in this stuff, you don't want to buy this trash or whatever, and you don't want any exposure to it.

It is worth going to their website. Go to the website just for the fun of it and spend some time reading about these amazing, exciting, innovative companies that are involved in all the amazing stuff that's going on in space. There's lots of AI on this website. There's lots of satellites up.

I mean, just everything, lots of weather stuff. It's even one that I would love to know more about. I'm going to click on this and it takes home insurance powered by science. How does that make it into a space portfolio? But it does. It's absolutely fascinating. It's worth visiting this website and spending a couple of hours on it. And I can't see a better way to learn a learn about space, apart from listening, of course, to Ted Marshall talking about space.

Thanks for listening for this week's Marin Talks Money. We'll be back next week. In the meantime, if you like our show, rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast and also do tell your friends about us. This episode was hosted by me, Marin Somerset Webb. It was produced by Sam Masadi, additional editing by Blake Maples, both of thanks to Tim Marshall and to John Steppek. And if you want to hear more, by the way, on John's thoughts on pensions, sign up to his newsletter, Money Distilled, which you can see on the website.

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